Can any of us be sure we wouldn’t have done our patriotic duty as Germans? Not just out of fear, but to keep invaders out?

A
ny publisher of non-fiction will tell you that in bad times as well as good
there is one topic guaranteed to shift books by the lorryload: Hitler and
the Nazis. So it is once more unto the breach for Sir Ian Kershaw, Britain’s
most feted and prolific historian of the Third Reich.

This week Allen Lane is publishing yet another of his blockbusters — by my
reckoning Kershaw’s 13th on the subject — entitled The End: Hitler’s Germany
1944-45.

So, my first question to this indefatigable documenter of Nazi depravity —
over a glass or three of his favourite German riesling — is: why, more than
65 years after the Führer’s death, is there still such an insatiable
appetite for more of the same?

“It’s a fascinating question, which I ask myself the whole time, and I still
don’t know. There is obviously a macabre fascination about the extremes of
absolute power and the